


Einsamkeit

by TheSpiderWriter



Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Human! Perry, M/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-13 04:41:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17481371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpiderWriter/pseuds/TheSpiderWriter
Summary: Heinz Doofenshmirtz wakes up on his eighteenth birthday to find he doesn't have a soulmark; when it still isn't there five years later, he gives up hope that he ever will have one. By the time it arrives, thirteen years late, Heinz isn't even sure he wants it anymore.********Perry Fletcher wakes bright and early on his eighteenth birthday to find his soulmark already in place, and he has a bad feeling about it right from the start. He's training to be an OWCA agent after all, his entire life's purpose is to take down crime, and soulmates can get in the way of such things. Not to mention... it's a *weird* soulmark.





	1. Saved By The Seat

**Author's Note:**

> Einsamkeit: The German word for "Loneliness." Not sure if it's a perfect title for this, but it's going to at least be my working title.

On Heinz’s eighteenth birthday he rises excitedly from slumber and immediately checking his torso and legs (his arms are synthetic, so if course the soulmark wouldn't be _there_ ) for anything new. He finds nothing, but undeterred throws off his blanket and rushes to the bathroom. He strips rapidly, using the mirror (and using the toilet as a step-stool) to rake his eyes over every inch of his body. Nothing.

He’s not worried. It was a long-shot anyway, he wasn’t born until noon, and sometimes the powers that be seem to take that into account. So he waits. And he waits. And he waits. Periodically tearing off his clothing to find nothing new underneath.

And then the day is over, and there’s not even a hint of anything that could bear a resemblance to a soulmark.

They come in many different forms--for some people it’s the first phrase they’ll say to you; for some a name; for some dates; a timer ticking up or down; a small “tattoo” of something significant; a finger or hand print. And a very unlucky few get a scar over the part of them that matches their soulmate’s cause of death.

Heinz is disappointed, but not perturbed; his soulmate must be younger than him. He’ll just have to wait for them to come of age. Then he’ll have his mark.

Days pass, and he forces himself to only look twice a day; once in the morning, once at night. Then once a day. Then once a week--no use putting himself through all that stress if his soulmate is a year or two behind.

The excitement fades to a pleasant anticipation over time. Months pass. Then years. And somewhere between years three and four, Heinz stops hoping. He doesn’t even realize it at first, that he’s just going through the motions. He’s tired, exhausted of humanity, of the way he’s treated every time he tries to just make friends. To just… peacefully coexist, even. Every single thing he does seems worse than the last.

Poetry doesn’t work out; painting doesn’t work out; when _Roger_ turns eighteen, _of course_ he already knows his soulmate in person, he’s always had amazing _stinkelkrampen_ . And yeah, Heinz was _expecting_ things to be, if not difficult then _complicated_ with his soulmate because he knows deep inside that he’s the common denominator in all his life’s problems. He’d already been planning to adjust his expectations and efforts accordingly when he met them. 

But there comes a day, not long after his twenty-third birthday, when he realizes that he hasn’t really looked in the mirror in _months_. And why should he? According to the customs of his people he isn’t even a man yet (if he was, would it actually make a difference in this aspect of his life?). Why would anyone want a schnitzel like him?

How could anyone _deserve_ to have a schnitzel like him? Except for himself? Yes, upon further introspection, Heinz concedes that this was inevitable. He makes everyone miserable; he makes _himself_ miserable. And if one’s soulmate is meant to be someone of whom they are worthy, then it makes sense that he would be his own soulmate, so to speak.

He’s never heard of it happening before, but he’s also never heard of children being adopted by ocelots, and here he is, legally a Central American Wildcat. Technically more legally ocelot than he is human, being that his parents declined to show up to his birth, and Drusselstein didn’t even adopt the whole “birth certificate” thing until around the time Roger was born. They’d gone back a year later to retroactively award them to those who weren’t religiously opposed to the concept, but by then he’d been with Mutti and Vati Ocelot.

The point being that Heinz has lived a whole life full of impossibilities--very few of them pleasant ones--so the idea that he was different in this way, too, wasn’t anywhere close to being a shock. Just a _massive_ disappointment.

Another box to tick off on his list of reasons to put his degree in evil science to work, rather than sitting on it like he’s been doing.

He throws himself into his work, trying to wreak havoc on Danville and the rest of the tristate area he settled in upon first arriving in America. On his journey to become the baddest of the bad, he meets a woman with a timer on her forearm; it won’t reach zero for another thirty years, and she’s willing to waste some time with Heinz. He knows, on one level, that this can’t last--that, best case scenario, that timer is ticking down to his own death date, and worst case in thirty years she’ll meet her special someone and vacate his life, leaving him once again empty-handed.

But he’s been lonely for so long. At first he tells himself it’s just for companionship. But then he falls for her. And she says yes when he asks her to marry him, so she must feel the same way, right? Except… not. When they’re not fighting about petty things like toilet seat covers and finances and what he's going to  _do_ with his life there’s a lot of cold silences, briefly broken with apologies and civility and that reprieve from loneliness that Heinz always manages to convince himself is _real,_ that _this time_ it will _last._

It never does. The longest they go without giving each other the cold shoulder starts shortly before he turns 31, when they find out there’s a tiny baby Doofenshmirtz on the way. Charlene doesn’t make things easy, but Heinz has never been an easy person to deal with, so he does everything he can to meet her where she stands. He waits on her hand and foot, he devotes massive amounts of time to baby-proofing the house, and to creating inators that will make life safer and more fun for their child.

When Vanessa comes into the world, Heinz is immediately enamored. He couldn’t imagine a moment more precious than the one where the doctor first deposits her in his arms. He pulls her close to him, and immediately she stops crying, looking up at him with tranquil curiosity.

“Hello, Vanessa,” he croons, grinning like a dope. “I’m your father, and I’m never going to let you down.”

“Good luck with that,” Charlene remarks, in the off-hand way she has that cuts to the bone, and always dismisses as a joke if he tells her so.

He bites his tongue this time. Nothing can ruin this moment, nothing in the world. Heinz Doofenshmirtz is 100% certain of it. Just having held her for a moment, he could die happy. But he won’t; he’ll make certain of it. Well, the dying now part, not necessarily the happy part (though it’s certainly not outside of his skillset). He's not his father, he will be  _there_ for his child.

Reluctantly he hands her to Charlene, but hovers close by until they’re released that afternoon.

As he adjusts to fatherhood (there’s a steep learning curve with humans; he helped Mutti Ocelot with his baby siblings Otto and Odette as a child, but distracting kittens with feathers while Mutti hunted and keeping a baby from screaming itself hoarse with colic are not experiences with much overlap), Heinz begins to wonder if maybe Vanessa is his soulmate.

Not in a creepy way, mind you! The very idea that he might _have_ that kind of idea makes him want to vomit and burn the top three layers of skin off his whole body. But he knows not all soulmates are romantic. Most are, sure, but he met a lot of artists in college with platonic soulmates, and more than one pair who were siblings. He’s never _heard_ of a child having their parent as a soulmate (though why _would_ he, times might be changing sure, but there are a lot of groups who throw protests anytime _any_ platonic soulmate pair is mentioned on television or in the movies except as the tragic pair that finds out that one of them _is_ actually in love _just before the other one dies!_ ), but as he’s thought many times, he’s experienced stranger things.

It’s a thought that’s nice to have for a few days, but soon he finds his paranoia acting up, worried that he’s passed his bad _stinkelkrampen_ on to his daughter. He really doesn’t want her to end up alone like him, or worse, alone _with him._ She’s his little girl and she deserves so much better than to have Heinz Doofenshmirtz as a _good friend_ let alone a soulmate.

It becomes a bad anxiety of his and he doesn’t know what to _do_ with it. It’s not a rash or a lock, he can’t wait the fear out or double-check to make sure about it.

Part of him thinks everyone would be better off if he just ran away and left them in peace, but he… he can’t do that. His father was always emotionally distant, he can’t put Vanessa through that. Besides, it’s irrational, founded in nothing! … But that’s what everybody says about the vending machines, and he knows they’re wrong there.

He can’t even talk to Charlene about it because she wouldn’t listen properly and blow it out of proportion and maybe try to take Vanessa away from him. And if she didn’t that would just mean she’d laugh at him. She never really believes anything important that he tries to talk about--she thinks he’s joking or making up stories when he talks about things like being a lawn gnome or Drusselsteinian rights of passage or his adoptive family. And for the things she does believe--well, she’s a great advocate for the devil and anybody else that isn’t Heinz.

And who else is he going to talk to?

So he tries to tell himself he’ll just have to wait eighteen years and then he’ll known for certain. Eighteen years isn’t so bad, right? He’s already done almost twice that! So he can live with it. And just like his concerns about his soulmark, it’ll change over time. He won’t worry so much in a few weeks. In a few years he’ll probably be laughing at himself about how ridiculous he is, if he can just get through the next few weeks.

But as it turns out, he doesn’t need to wait that long at all. Two weeks after Vanessa comes home he wakes up with a tattoo: the initials “PPF,” right across his forehead.

His legs go weak, and he has to sit down, staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Tracing the letters with his forefingers. Not sure how he should react.

He decides it must be a joke. Charlene drew it on his face in sharpie, she’s always had good penmanship. Or maybe she let Roger visit while he was sleeping, and he did it. Or… well, the rationalizations just get less rational from there.

He tries to wipe it off. Then wash it off. Then scrub it. Then scrub _harder,_ and eventually his forehead is red and raw but the ink hasn’t run, not even a little bit. He doesn’t even notice that the sink is plugged until the water is spilling out over his feet, he’s so focused.

Charlene knocks on the bathroom door and Heinz can feel his whole world spinning out from underneath him. He’s panicking, bracing himself against countertop with his elbows. Anytime a good thing happens to him it gets torn away. He’s never been allowed to keep one before, and he doesn’t know whether the good thing in this situation is Charlene or if it’s PPF, but he can feel the room closing in on him because if he knows his life as well as he thinks he does he’s going to lose both.

“Heinz, I’m coming in,” Charlene tells him, twisting the knob.

“Just a minute,” Heinz yelps, pushing himself back and up so fast that he slips in the puddle under his feet, feet slapping comically against tile for purchase before he loses the fight and cracks his head on the toilet seat.

He maintains consciousness for all of the time it takes him to think, _She’s going to be so smug when she gets to say her toilet lid cover saved my life._


	2. Considering The Ramifications

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heinz comes to terms with his soulmark. Sort of.

When the paramedics bring him around Charlene is exactly that smug for exactly that reason--she loves being able to say  _ I told you so,  _ even when she’s gotten her way. She also has a lecture prepared for him about bathroom safety and the ridiculous writing on his forehead, was he really so concerned about getting permanent marker off his skin that he had to give himself an infection? He hadn’t realized he’d broken the skin but he was also, in his defense, freaking out. 

She’s putting two and two together but making three instead of four, because respectable people don’t go getting soulmarks in their thirties. It’s something that’s always seemed arbitrary to Heinz, because it’s not something that can be chosen, but then neither is ninety-nine percent of the things a person is judged on, so it’s fairly on-brand for the human race. 

Heinz is having trouble focusing, and he’s not sure if that’s because he’s still in the middle of a fairly static panic attack, or if he maybe has a slight concussion. Either way, they’re the ones who clear up the confusion while Heinz listens in a way that makes the world echo just a little.

“He probably thought it was sharpie,” one of them says, “but that’s a soulmark right there.” 

Charlene’s face creases into a measured frown. “Are you sure about that?” she asks. “At his age?”

“Yeah, after scrubbing with an SOS pad--” (Heinz may have gone a little overboard) “--you’d see some degradation from a sharpie, or a pen, and there’d be more blood if it was a fresh tattoo.”

“We sees this sometimes,” the other medic says conversationally, finishing bandaging up Heinz’s head. “Kids hurts themselves all the time bein’ all over-excitable but they mostly see it comin’. After twenty-five peoples get thrown for a real loop when it finally happens.” 

If Heinz has a concussion it’s mild enough that they don’t mention it and let him stay home. He’s still dizzy when they leave him alone in the bedroom with his wife, but he’s starting to calm down. 

Charlene hits him with her most unimpressed stare and he thinks he might have to reconsider the calm thing. “Now that you’re done making a fool of yourself Heinz,” she says humorlessly, “maybe you'd like to take care of that.” She nods at him, and he knows what she means. The paramedics didn't bother bandaging the soulmark. It's probably in their training not to unless it's life-threatening; a lot of religious sects consider it an affront to God to cover one that ends up on the head.

For now he bandages it, and later he'll figure out how to put makeup on it before going out. At his age suddenly getting a soulmark is an uncomfortable thing. It comes with a lot of questions he doesn't have answers to. And a stigma.

Charlene never  _ says  _ the soulmark bothers her, but he knows it does. In retrospect it probably bothers her less because it's there and more because he didn't want to tell her about it.  Maybe she thought he knew whoever PPF is. He doesn't. 

They divorce when Vanessa is four, and it's so contentious an affair that, for a total of three seconds, Heinz wishes they'd never had Vanessa ,so he'd never have a reason to talk to Charlene ever again.

He'll hate himself forever for that thought.

After that he goes back to school and dedicates his life to evil science in its entirety. Well, except for the weekends. Weekends are reserved for his baby girl. 

Every morning he covers his soulmark with waterproof makeup and tries not to think about how weird it is that his soulmate might not have even been out of high school when he had his daughter. It's such an uncomfortable age difference, he doesn't like to think about it.

There's a part of him that's excited at the prospect of meeting someone who could make his life complete. The idea that maybe he can finally have something  _ good,  _ something  _ great  _ in his life. 

But what could single part-time father full-time evil scientist Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz _possibly_ have in common with a kid in college? Even as a platonic soulmate, he can't think of anything he could offer them. He's-- he's not really  _ good  _ at anything. Except rambling and, arguably inventing. 

He's especially bad at  _ people.  _ He just doesn't understand them. Doesn't understand what makes them so cruel, or why occasionally they can be so unexpectedly kind. Often at the worst possible moments. He was never given the tools he needed to break the code. 

He's not good at comforting people, he's not great at listening, or remembering important things, he has no common sense and makes massive logical errors at every turn… He's a mess! He can't imagine what sort of pathetic person's life would be made  _ better _ by his presence.

A part of him... doesn't really want to find out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tada! Chapter two, as promised. I have barely started the next chapter so I don't know when it will drop (hopefully soon) but I do know next up we'll be hearing from our boy Perry.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be adding tags as I add new chapters--and adjusting ratings if applicable, idk. I've got most of another chapter done right now, but I'm going in blind on this. All I know for certain is that Doof and Perry are endgame.  
> The names of Heinz's siblings were taken from Chaos_Valkyrie's Agent O series. I highly recommend reading it if you haven't already, it's beautiful.


End file.
